The Beginning(The Popes Children)

Well then, where do I start? The beginning I suppose! I am one of the “Popes Children” as my generation is often called. Born in the early 80’s after the popes famous visit to the Phoenix Park in 1979. Growing up on a farm in rural Ireland money was never something I really thought about. We had all we needed. Ireland wasn’t exactly a rich country back then. So nobody really had anything. No fancy car’s. no holidays abroad, our clothes were from Dunne’s the same as everybody else. Therefore, you never felt you missed out on anything. It was what it was. My parents never spoke to us about money, bills or anything like that so it was never a concern. This is one thing I’ve changed with my own kids, I teach them the value of money. (More on that in future posts).

Fast forward to 2000. I was living in a bedsit in Rathmines and so broke paying the rent. I was going to collage in the day and babysitting at night but was managing my money well. I was very careful with the little I had, budgeting out my rent, food, rare nights out, even my bus money. Budgeting like a pro! I longed for the day I would work full time and have cash. That day came and I continued budgeting well, saving the money for a house deposit in one year. I remember getting paid bi-weekly and using the first pay check for my rent and living expenses and the second all went into the savings account for the house. Super sensible for such a young age.

Let’s fast forward again to where it all went wrong! I reckon 2004, I was married living in the house I saved so hard for. The Celtic Tiger was roaring, I was earning more money than I ever thought possible with my qualifications in a cozy government job. Both our bank balances were rolling, the building trade was flying. Letters for offers for credit cards, loans, higher purchases, overdrafts were flying in the door. When I look back now I had two credit cards on the go at one stage! WTF!!! A Visa and a Mastercard! We had two new 2004 cars parked in our drive (finance of course), a fantastic social life, a meal out every Friday night, fancy holidays to the Bahamas, clothes shopping every week and new furniture as often as we felt like it or got bored of what we had. The banks were begging us to take their money, pushing up our overdrafts and credit limits monthly. Whatever came in went out equally as fast. We were living the champagne life, keeping up with Jones and basically without a pot to piss in!

Let’s skip ahead again. It’s 2010, I have just found out I am preggers with baby number 3. I lost my well paying job with the government simply because hey there is a recession on and they pulled all funding from that sector. I panic and find a job just to get maternity pay. The job was over a hour away from home, only four hours a day and when I payed fuel and childcare, I was left with 50 euro a week. Miserable I know but it was all I could get and at least it meant I had maternity leave pay.

2011 baby was born and the marriage ended. Ireland really was a miserable place back then. I couldn’t find a job anywhere so once maternity leave ended, I went on lone-parent payment. During this time my credit card limit was 8000 euro! How???? I already had 5000 euro on the card and a overdraft of 3000 euro which all really needed to be paid off but I think I had some sort of identity crisis. I racked up anther 3000 euro in credit card debt through hairdressers (I went blonde, red and back to black in 12 months!) beauty treatments, clothes you name it. I think this was my rock bottom. Something needed to change. What was I going to do? I had these debts and no way to clear them and no job to support us.

I thought long and hard and decided to go back to collage. This happened in 2012 when I went to study nursing. This was the moment my life changed. I was lucky to get a place through the mature nursing application and off I went. Applied for SUSI grants and continued on loan parent payment. Now the debts needed to be sorted. I couldn’t afford my mortgage, I couldn’t pay the min payments on the credit cards and my bank account was always in the red due to the overdraft. I went to MABS who were amazing (more on this in future post). I was getting my life back. I qualified in 2016 and never looked back.

Those early MASSIVE debts got sorted and I was so happy. Then two years ago I did the oddest thing. You would swear that I would have learnt my lesson but hey ho I did it again. I took out not one but two credit union loans in a year! Why? Because of instant gratification. This time it wasn’t about keeping up with the Jones but pure and simple I couldn’t, more like I didn’t want to wait to save the money. However, I am earning enough money to pay off these loans easy and early and that will be part of this blog. My main goal is to pay of my mortgage as quickly as possible. I will be blogging my journey along the way, with all the money saving tips and tricks I’ve learnt through my journey. I also hope to go into deeper details of this post in future! What started as a motivation page on Instagram a few weeks ago while on maternity leave, still on maternity leave I hope sharing my story through this blog might help other people! I created this blog myself through reading things on google so it’s no way professional but I hope you enjoy 😉